Thursday, 10 March 2022

Duck hunting

Mr RICH-PHILLIPS (South Eastern Metropolitan) (10:17): Labor has again shown its contempt for Victorian hunters with a last-minute intervention designed to strangle the 2022 duck season. An abundance of water birds identified in the Game Management Authority’s own helicopter survey meant hunters could have expected a full season with a full bag as laid down in the game regulations. Instead the Labor government intervened at the last minute to override the regulations and impose a bag limit of just four birds per day. Labor’s undermining of duck season undermines the regional communities that rely on the economic boost hunting delivers and undermines the thousands of Victorian families, the majority of whom live in suburban Melbourne, for whom hunting is a multigenerational cultural tradition.

Labor is quick to preach tolerance, inclusion and diversity yet happy to demonise those who enjoy traditional Australian cultural pursuits. It is happy to feed a myth that near-instant death through hunting is somehow cruel while a natural death through disease or starvation or injury or predation—that is, being eaten by other animals—is somehow kind. In 2019 the Labor Party state conference voted to ban duck hunting. Since then the Labor government has worked to ban hunting by stealth by strangling the season with unjustified restrictions. Hunting families throughout Melbourne’s suburbs should be in no doubt that if Labor wins the November election duck season will be banned and another traditional Australian cultural pursuit destroyed.